Tuesday, August 23, 2011

The non-convertible Sebring. Part Two.

Recently, having been able to upgrade to a significantly better car, I've been trying to sell the Sebring. I opened a craigslist post and began typing out the good things about the car - about how the now completely mice-free a/c cools things down quickly. How the seats are leather and the drivers seat is a power seat. The new tires. And that thanks to my having a relatively short drive between college and home, the car only has about 89,000 miles. These are all great things, yes.

But in the back of my mind, I felt like I was cheating. Driving a Sebring is an experience that given the choice, many will choose never to have again. This was basically my first car, so until recently, I thought that my legs going numb after a half hour of driving was just the way cars worked. And that if I didn't stretch before an hour long trip, my back would go numb too.

Then my husband and I got a Corolla and suddenly I learned that driving didn't have to be a painful experience. (Although the Corolla is manual, so there's a whole lot of back story there too). In the Sebring, there's no such thing as a 3-point turn. If you have four uninterrupted lanes of traffic, you can pull off a 5-point turn and on residential streets, you're going to hit a curb no matter how hard you try. U-turns were unheard of, unless you felt like making one from the right turning lane of your current direction to the right shoulder of the other direction. What I'm trying to impart here is that the Sebring turns like an full size van and that's being unfair to the van. My husband used to drive a full sized van and a box truck for work and after driving the Sebring, he insisted that both handled better than it. That seemed harsh but after watching him make a 3-point turn in the van, I had to concede defeat.

Unsurprisingly, I have yet to sell the Sebring. I don't mind. It was my first car and there's some sentimental value. Plus, it costs next to nothing to insure given that its KBB value is around $3,000 at the time of this post. Not to mention I'm still learning to drive manual and when I have to drive somewhere with a lot of hills, I like having a back up option. (If you've never driven manual, when you go to get into first gear on a hill, you roll backwards until you give the car gas. It's unnerving the first few times. The first hundred few times. Maybe always; I don't know yet).

So in any case, if you're looking to buy a car in the panhandle region, I've got a Sebring you might like. Hit me up.